Siskoid – Somewhere in me is a post about how I had more patience for Thomas’ Golden Age comics history lessons/stories when I was younger than I do now. They were compelling to me at the time, but…I don’t know what it is now, but they just feel like rough-going to me.

Yeah, what was with All-Star Squadron turning into an origins anthology book there at the end? It was like after the Crisis, Thomas decided he just didn’t want to bother messing with the new continuity and filled out his contract with these fill-in origin stories.

That’s basically what happened. More to the point, after CoIE finally wrapped completely (ASSq and LSH being the last holdouts), DC brass didn’t really have an approved direction for the book. They wanted it to keep going, as it was one of the line’s strongest performers, but they also didn’t want to use the GA characters — particularly those with modern-day namesakes — for all the usual reasons (too old, too tied to “ancient” times, too difficult for Kahn to grasp the existence of multiple characters with the same nick, etc.). Thomas wasn’t approved to run new plotlines, nor was he allowed to use most of his characters.

What Thomas =did= have was a stack of origins material in inventory (to be used either as ASSq emergency fill-ins or for his half of SECRET ORIGINS, as needed), so that was what he had to run for several months until the fateful decision to convert the book into a teen title finally came down.